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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: 



A PA I' El! 



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THE LITERARY SOCIETY 



OF THK 



CITV OK WASHINGTON, 13. C, 



April i8, A. D. 1.S92, 



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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: 



A PAPER 

7 t^ 



RKAD BEFORE 



THE LITERARY SOCIETY 



OF THE 



CITY OK WASHINOTON, D. C, 



April i8, A. D. 1892, 



BY 

y 
' // 

MARTIN W^ MORRIS, LL.D. 



Washington, D. C: 

Stormont & Jackson, Printers. 

1S92. 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 



Separated from eacli other by intervals of about fif- 
teen centuries each, three great events stand out promi- 
nent beyond all others in human history. About fifteen 
centuries after the first ajipearance of civilization on 
the Plains of Shinar, the great movement occurred 
which is known to us as the Exodus of Israel from 
Egypt, the first protest of monotheistic truth and re- 
publican i>rinciple against the corruptions of polythe- 
ism and the licentiousness of arbitrary monarchy, and 
which eventuated in the establishment of a government 
of law in opposition to the governments of the sword 
which then dominated the world. About fifteen cen- 
turies later, the Divine Teacher of Nazareth jireached 
the new Dispensation of the Fatherhood of God and 
the brotherhood of man, and soon by his preach- 
ing revolutionized the world. Again, fifteen centu- 
ries later still, when Christian truth and Christian 
faith had almost grown faint in their long contest of a 
thousand years with the superstitions of Odinism and 
the fanaticism of the false prophet of Arabia, when 
Gothic feudalism and Mohammedan intolerance had 
almost crushed out human freedom from the earth, the 
hopes of the human race were quickened, into a new 
life by the discovery of a New World. These three 
great events wonderfully supplement each other in the 
Divine co-ordination of human history, and in the de- 
velopment of human civilization. 

(3) 



4 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 

Monotheism and republicanism were the concurrent 
and necessarily connected outgrowth of the Israelite re- 
bellion against Egypt. These two were likewise the es- 
sential elements of Christianity, and these two finally 
determined the exodus from the Old World to the New 
that made of the New World the j^romised land which 
bigotry had blotted from the map of the Eastern Conti- 
nent. By Moses was established, or restored, the reign 
of law. It was the pur^^ose of the religion promulgated 
by the Crucified Nazarene to free the human mind from 
the fetters that ignorance and tyranny had imposed 
upon it. It is not too much to say, that to the splen- 
did achievement of Christopher Columbus we are in- 
debted for the fairest field on which the law may reign 
supreme, and freedom find its holiest home. 

Only by those who are familiar with the history of 
the long and desperate struggle between the cause of 
human freedom and the infamous system of feudalism 
with which the Goths and Vandals and their cognate 
barbarians had sought to fetter the free thought of 
Europe; and by those who are familiar at the same 
time with the magnitude of the disaster which over- 
whelmed Asia when the fanatics of Arabia and the 
hideous hordes of Turkestan destroyed the civiliza- 
tions of Antioch and Persepolis, can the relief be fully 
appreciated that was brought to the human race by 
the exploit of Columbus. Columbus was an ardent 
Christian and an equally ardent republican. He came 
of a race that had been Christian and republican for 
ages. The republican cities of Italy had ever been the 
stout defenders of the cause of human liberty against 
Gothic tyranny and Arab fanaticism. In the land 
of Dante and Petrarch, of "blind old Dandolo" and 
heroic Andrea Doria, of ill-fated Rienzi and the mar- 
tyred Savonarola, liberty had found a home, while 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 5 

robber barons and degraded serfs lield almost all the 
rest of Europe, while Saxon and Suabian contended for 
empire in Germany, and feudalism held high carnival 
in France, and brutal Plantagenet and unprincipled 
York and irresolute Lancaster laid England waste 
with their savage disputes for a crown. In the repub- 
lican cities of Italy was kept alive not only the spirit 
of freedom, but its ever concomitant spirit of enter- 
prise ; and their adventurous merchants and daring 
navigators not only sought the golden gardens of the 
Hesperides in the West, but likewise from time to 
time turned tlieir wistful eyes and longing hearts to 
the primal home of our race by the amber portals of 
the morning sun. By the republican cities of Italy 
the most strenuous efforts were made to keep open the 
intercourse between Asia and Euroj)e, between the east 
and the west, that seems to have been ever necessary 
in order to prevent the nations from wholly forgetting 
the great doctrine of the brotherhood of man, first 
X)roclaimed upon Sinai and reiterated upon Calvary. 

Mohammedanism had planted itself an almost ada- 
mantine barrier in the way of this intercourse. It had 
closed the Nile and the Red Sea to the commerce of Eu- 
rope. It had destroyed Baalbec and Palmyra, and the 
great caravan routes through Asia. Like a vampire it 
had sucked out the life-blood of the Byzantine and Zoro- 
astrian civilizations ; and the Crusades had broken in 
vain against its barriers. The Ishmaelite ruffians from 
the deserts of Arabia had well supplemented in the East 
the systematic attack upon civilization conducted in 
the West by the robber barons and their lawless feudal 
chiefs. The republican cities of Italy, and chief among 
them Venice and Genoa, while beating back the feudal- 
ism of the North from their borders, at the same time 
sought to circumvent Mohammedanism and to reopen 
the way to the East. 



6 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 

In the thirteenth century rumors reached Eurox)e 
of a powerful Asiatic prince somewhere beyond the re- 
gions ruled by Mohammedanism, an enemy of that 
politico-religious system and a friend of Christianity. 
He was sometimes even represented as a priest, and des- 
ignated by the name of Prester John, or the Priest- King 
John. We now know him to have been an imaginary 
personage; but there was foundation for the belief in 
him from the fact of the great similarity of Buddhism 
to Christianity, and from the fact that in Thibet a 
priest-king, the Grand Lama, reigned; and from the 
further fact that just then had arisen in Mongolia the 
great conqueror, Jenghis Khan, who, with his sons and 
successors, proved a powerful foe to the domination of 
the Arabian religion. 

The imagination of Europe was aflame to open com- 
munication with Prester John ; and the republic of Ven- 
ice sent the celebrated Marco Polo as its ambassador to 
the great Oriental potentate. By way of the Black Sea 
and the Caspian, Marco Polo, surmounting difficulties 
the most arduous, j^enetrated into the heart of Asia, 
and finally found his way, not to the court of the myth- 
ical Prester John, but to that of the magnificent Kub- 
I lai Khan, grandson of the famous Jenghis, at Cambalu 

or Pekin. Kublai Khan ruled the largest and most 
populous empire the world has ever known. Marco 
Polo was well received by him, and was induced to 
enter into the service of the Mongolian Empire, in which 
he attained the highest dignities and remained for 
twenty-five years. He was then sent by Kublai Khan 
on an embassy to Persia; and the adventurous Venetian, 
instead of crossing the vast intervening mountains and 
deserts, boldly essayed to reach Persia by sea. Em- 
barking from one of the ports of China or Cathay, he 
passed through the Chinese Sea and the Straits of Mai- 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 7 

acca and, crossing the Indian Ocean, doubled Cape 
Comorin, skirted the shores of Hindustan and Gedrosia, 
entered the Persian Gulf, and cast anchor at last in 
the Euphrates — a most daring and remarkable voyage 
when we consider the time of its occurrence and the 
circumstances under which it was made. From Persia 
the brilliant adventurer found his way back to his na- 
tive Venice, after an absence of nearly thirty years. He 
wrote a narrative of his adventures in the East, which 
was long regarded merely as a traveller's romance, but 
which we now know to have been true even to the mi- 
nutest detail. 

I have dwelt on the story of Marco Polo, because its 
influence on the history of Columbus was very great. 
The accounts brought to Europe by Marco Polo of the 
power and greatness of the Mongolian emperors, of the 
marvellous wealth of Cipango and Cathay — the names 
by which he designated Japan and China— and most of 
all, of that strange religion of the East, Buddhism, 
redoubled the desire of the ardent spirits of the Medi- 
terranean to reach the Orient. Genoa wa's aroused to 
emulate the success of Venice. Moreover, the Renais- 
sance was breaking upon Europe ; literature revived ; 
the dreams of Plato were dreamed again under the 
shadow of the Alps and the Appennines. Toscanelli 
renewed the theory of the sphericity of the earth that 
had been broached two thousand years before by Pytha- 
goras at Crotona. Humanity was striving more earn- 
estly than ever before to break the fetters of feudal 
restraint. And Christopher Columbus came at last 
divinely commissioned to clothe the world's nascent 
idealities in realism. 

He, too, would reach Cipango and Cathay, and 
bring them into communication with Europe. He 
proclaimed the earth to be a globe ; previously it had 



8 CHRISTOPHEE COLUMBUS. 

been commonly believed to be a vast plain ; and he 
would sj)an that globe, and come ont upon the east 
coast of Asia by sailing westward from Europe. He 
would carry the light of Christianity and European 
civilization to the vast regions which, with prophetic 
insight, he believed to extend south and east from 
the Continent of Asia; and he would bring the wealth 
of the Indies to the shores of Europe through the 
gates of the setting sun and not by the portals of the 
rising day. 

No doubt Columbus was familiar with much of the 
legendary lore connected with the lost Island of At- 
lantis, with the Irish story of St. Brendan's Isle, and 
the story of the mythical voyage of the mythical 
Prince Madoc ; and he seems to have sailed to Iceland, 
and to have become acquainted there with the adven- 
turous voyages of the Norsemen along the shores of 
Arctic seas to Greenland and Vineland ; and the 
vague and misty reminiscences that had come down 
from antiquity of the wonderful maritime enterprises 
conducted by Carthage and Phamicia in the days of 
their greatness to the west of the Straits of Gades or 
Gibraltar, still lingered along the shores of the Medi- 
terranean. And it may be that he had read those 
remarkably prophetic lines in the younger Seneca's 
"Tragedy of Medea," in which the Roman dramatist 
strangely anticipated the discovery of America nearly 
fourteen hundred years before the event : 

" Venient annis saeciila scris, 
Quibiis Oceanus vincula rerum, 
Laxet, et ingens pateat tell us, 
Tethysque novos detegat orbes, 
Nee erit terris ultima Thule." 

Which, for the benefit of those of my auditors whose 
classical readings may have become indistinct amid the 
engrossing cares of daily life, I have taken the liberty 
to paraphrase as follows : 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, 9 

" When later years o'er earth have rolled. 
Ocean shall nature's bonds unfold, 

. And far beyoiid the Western Sea 
New worlds discover; then no more, 
Upon the broad Atlantic shore, 

The last of lands shall Thule be." 

But whatever influence these legends and remi- 
niscences may have had upon the age in which Colum- 
bus lived, and however adroitly he may have used 
them to establish the plausibility of his theories, there 
is no doubt that his own mind rested for the truth of 
those theories on a basis of scientific truth and a truly 
philosophic insight into the true system of nature and 
of nature's laws. 

The great enterprise which he projected was beyond 
the power of unaided individual action. It required 
the resources of a nation and the sanction of organized 
authority to carry it into effect. But to the nation 
that would undertake it he j)romised power, and glory, 
and undying fame. 

To his own native city he first proposed that Genoa 
should be that nation. But Genoa hesitated— hesi- 
tated too long. Venice, Portugal, Florence, France, 
England, were appealed to in succession ; and all 
appeals were vain. For eighteen long years he 
struggled with opposition, adversity, almost despair. 
Every school-boy knows the story — the story of per- 
sistent effort, humiliation, and failure — and of yet 
more persistent faith, rising superior to all failure, in 
the mission which he preached. And every school- 
boy knows how, at last, under the walls of romantic 
Granada, while the last death-struggle was waged by 
the advancing hosts of Castille and Aragon against 
the hated Moslem, in sight of the Alhambra, over 
which yet floated the flag of Abdallah and gleamed 
the Crescent of Islam, the great Genoese met a soul as 



10 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 

lofty as his own, one who conld enter into the spirit 
of his grand conception and sympathize with his 
heroic as]3irations, one who conld lead in person a 
desperate charge of mail-clad men, where hostile 
spears were thickest and hostile cannon thundered 
their deadliest volleys, and yet was the most womanly 
of women — the beautiful, the gifted, the heroic Isabella, 
Queen of Castille and Leon. 

No nobler woman ever sat upon a throne than Isa- 
bella the Catholic. She had found Spain rent by civil 
factions and divided into petty sovereignties. She 
made of those petty sovereignties a nation, without de- 
stroying their, liberties or impairing their indej)endent 
existence. She had found the hereditary and relentless 
foes of Spain, the hated alien race of the Moors from 
Africa, still intrenched amid the fastnesses of the Sierra 
Nevada, still suj^reme over Sixain's most beautiful prov- 
ince, Andalusia; and she never rested until the last of 
those foes had departed from Granada, and her own 
X3roud banner floated in triumph over a re- united conn- 
try. She led her armies in person; and no enterprise 
was too daring for her which seemed to be for the good 
of Spain. When her too cautious or too calculating 
husband hesitated or would have turned back, she never 
shrunk from difficulty or danger. She laid siege to 
Granada when Ferdinand of Aragon counselled post- 
ponement of that desperate enterprise. Rampart after 
rampart, and fortress after fortress, she carried by storm 
when his slower nature or less resolute spirit would 
have preferred the more sluggish operation of siege or 
circumvallation. And yet a more devoted wife, a more 
devoted mother, a more lovely woman, there never lived 
than Isabella of Castille. History has not often mani- 
fested in any woman, never in any other woman that 
has occupied a throne, a nobler combination of great 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. H 

and good qualities with fewer weaknesses than were 
found in this one who, above all other women that ever 
lived, held in her hands the destinies of the human race. 
For upon her decision under heaven it depended whether 
America was to be or not— whether the current of human 
history was to be turned back and dammed within the 
sluggish canals of feudal despotism forever, or whether 
humanity was to receive new life in a new world. 

The decision could not have been in nobler, wiser, or 
better hands. Fortunately, while such a seat of learn- 
ing as the University of Salamanca rejected the scheme 
of Columbus as visionary and impracticable, the monks 
of the Convent of La Rabida had become his enthusi- 
astic advocates. Juan Perez, prior of La Rabida, had 
been the confessor of Isabella; he was the friend of Co- 
lumbus. He introduced the latter to the Queen. The 
appeal to her in the name of humanity, of Christianity, 
of civilization, Isabella was unable to resist. Moreover, 
to her enlightened mind the theory of Columbus ap- 
peared reasonab] e. With characteristic caution, Ferdi- 
nand of Aragon shrunk from the enterprise; and Isa- 
bella undertook it for her own Castille and Leon. Her 
treasury had been heavily burdened by the expense of 
the Moorish war ; but for the great enterprise of Co- 
lumbus, she did not hesitate to pledge her crown-jewels. 

We know the sequel ; but how little do we appreciate 
at this day what that great enterprise meant at the 
time and under the circumstances in which it was 
accomplished. Accustomed as we now are to regard a 
voyage aci'oss the Atlantic in one of the floating palaces, 
propelled by forces of which even Columbus never 
dreamed, as no more than a mere holiday excursion, 
we can scarcely comprehend, much less appreciate, the 
difficulties that confronted the great navigator, and 
the sublimity of moral heroism required l^y that enter- 



1§ CllEISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 

prise. No more lieroic deed was ever done in all the 
annals of time. When Horatins held the Melvin 
Bridge against the overwhelming hosts of Lars Por- 
sena, nntil the huge structure was cut away behind 
him, and he leaped into the boiling flood in all his 
armor clad and swam to the Roman shore ; when 
Leonidas, at the narrow Pass of Thermopylae, held the 
swarming myriads of Persia's King at bay, although 
he knew he must be overwhelmed at last; when the 
young republican. General Bonaparte, dashed into 
the fires of hell that were belched from Austria's hun- 
dred cannon on the Bridge of Lodi ; when Lord Nelson 
hurled his ship against the hostile lines at Trafalgar, 
and perished as he did the deed, as he had antici- 
pated ; each and all of these had ' ' the rapture of the 
strife" to sustain them that sometimes makes even 
cowards brave. But how superior to all this were the 
resolute purpose and the lofty inspiration that nerved 
the heart of "the world-seeking Crenoese,'' when, on 
the morning of the 3d of August, in the year 1492, he 
entered upon that wonderful voyage that has never 
had i:)arallel before or since ; when he plunged into 
that unknown waste of waters that bounded the 
western shores of Europe in the apparently insane 
attempt to come out upon the eastern shores of Asia ; 
when day after day, week after week, month after 
month, he sailed westward upon that unknown waste, 
with unswerving faith in his grand idea that never fal- 
tered, yet never had corroboration of its truth; when 
farther and farther he pushed into that trackless and 
mysterious ocean, in three frail vessels, to which now 
we would scarcely be willing to commit ourselves upon 
a peaceful inland river, with no human aid possible, 
no human heart nigh, no hope but in God above and 
his own great soul ! 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 13 

West — west — west — lie went into the ever-growing- 
waste of waters. West — west — west — and neither set- 
ting sun nor rising day gave promise of the fulfillment 
of his dream, that seemed from day to day more than 
ever a dream — yea, worse than a dream — a madman's 
fancy. He came into the Sargosso Sea, even yet mys- 
terious with its wilderness of weeds ; and the super- 
stitious mariners regarded it as an ocean of the dead. 
West — west — west ! Day rose and set, and rose again, 
and endless ocean yet rolled before them and around 
them. The spirit of mutiny grew in the hearts of his 
companions. They entreated their leader to return be- 
fore it was too late. They murmured ; they threatened ; 
they were ready at last to rise in open revolt. Even 
the stout heart of Martin Alonzo Pinzon quailed, that 
had never known fear before. Columbus parleyed, 
negotiated, entreated. Amid all that wilderness of 
water, before that rising storm of mutiny, his faith never 
faltered ; his soul never once lost sight of its grand 
purpose. But the storm was brewing around him, too 
powerful even for him to stem. At last, he bowed his 
head in sorrow, and promised to turn back in three 
days, if land were not then discovered. At the same 
time he ordered every sail set, and every rope strained, 
to push his vessels farther into the unknown West. 

The night had come. The stars were up. The time 
limited for the performance of his promise was rapidly 
drawing to a close. Sad and thoughtful, the great Ad- 
miral stood on the deck of the Santa Maria, and x^eered 
wistfully into the darkness — and into the ages that were 
to come. Was it a fancy — that sudden flash of light 
that was gone, almost before it was seen 1 Probably it 
was only the reflection of phosphorescent light from a 
brooding and overworked brain — a lightning flash, such 
as sometimes seems to pass before our physical vision, 



14 CHEISTOPHEE OOLUMBFS. 

when the mind has been greatly occupied with some 
dominant idea. The inspired soul of Cohimbus saw in 
that fitful gleam of light the signal that the "Indian 
Isles were nigh." He ordered the vessels to heave to 
for the night. Long, eventful, hopeful, yet almost 
painful night ! At last the day dawned — the morning 
of the 12th of October, 1492 — and the sun shone clear and 
bright on the island of San Salvador — brightest morn- 
ing the world had ever known since first the stars sang 
on Creation's primal day, and the young earth went re- 
joicing through the firmament. 

The goal was reached, the prize was won. The mar- 
vellous discovery was achieved — greater, far greater in 
its results than even Columbus had ever dreamed. The 
great enterprise was no longer a madman's fancy, but 
the realized inspiration of genius the most sublime. 
Cipango and Cathay, "the wealth of Ormus and Ind," 
were revealed to Europe. Oh, no! It was a new world 
that arose before them, although they knew it not — the 
continent of Montezuma and Atahualpa, the land that 
was to be of Bolivar and Washington. 

We are told that the Norsemen had anticipated Co- 
lumbus. So they had. There is but little doubt that 
those lurid buccaneers of the North seas had coasted 
the shores of Labrador, and probably those of Nova 
Scotia and New Foundland, three hundred years be- 
fore Cohimbus crossed the ocean ; and it may be that 
they found their Vineland, where fashion and folly now 
find their choicest shrine, along the shores of Narragan- 
sett Bay, although this is rather improbable. But their 
discoveries were never utilized; there never was beneficial 
result of any kind from them; they proved absolutely 
nothing; and they had long been abandoned and utterly 
forgotten, if, indeed, they had ever been known beyond 
a few of the Norsemen themselves. And what have 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 15 

they to do, after all, with the grand exj^loit of Colum- 
bus ? The discovery of a new continent w^as only an 
incident in the great enterprise of Columbus — an inci- 
dent, as it proved, of transcendant importance, and yet 
only an incident ; and, as if to emphasize that circum- 
stance, he not only lived and died in ignorance of the 
fact that he had discovered a new continent, but he was 
not permitted even to give that continent a name. The 
honor of naming it was ajipropriated by a more fortu- 
nate fellow-countryman. The achievement of Colum- 
bus was greatly broader than the discovery of a new 
continent. It revolutionized our system of geography 
and astronomy ; it placed both for the first time on a 
solid basis of scientific truth. It taught us that our 
earth was a globe, and that it could be circumnavi- 
gated. It brought all the world into closer relation- 
ship, and laid it all open to the energetic enterprise of 
the Aryan nations. And best of all — and this it is 
which Columbus most dearly cherished — it gave a 
long- desired outlet to the manhood of Europe rudely 
compressed within the restraints of feudal slavery 
established throughout Europe by the kindred of those 
very Norsemen, with whose claim to priority of dis- 
covery it is sought to dim the glory of Columbus. 

The mission of Columbus was not to ravage or plun- 
der, to destroy or degrade, like the CjEsars and Napo- 
leons who have strewn our earth with hostile bones. 
No enterprise ever undertaken or accomplished by man 
was more grandly conceived, or more beneficent in its 
ultimate results. Next to the Divine Founder of Chris- 
tianity and to the divinely commissioned leader of the 
Exodus of Israel, Christopher Columbus has proved to be 
the greatest benefactor the world has ever had. For to 
the success of his enterprise is directly due the fact that 
the oppressed peox)le of Europe were enabled at last to 



16 CHRISTOPHEE COLUMBUS. 

escape from the galling fetters of Feudalism against 
wliicli they had struggled so long and almost so hope- 
lessly, and to lind in the New World a home for civil 
liberty where the true principles of human freedom 
could be securely nurtured, and from which they could 
be made to react upon Europe. Our American freedom 
is not merely the sequel; it is the legitimate result of 
the heroic struggles of Christopher Columbus. And 
now that our principles of civil liberty have shattered 
the thrones of the military despots of Europe, and com- 
pelled the bigoted feudal monarchies of the Old World 
to yield to the aspirations of their peoples striving to 
be free, we may well question whether that result would 
ever have been possible without the splendid achieve- 
ment of the great republican navigator. It is true it 
has required three hundred years for the cause to pro- 
duce its full effect. So it required three hundred years 
from the time when the Galilean hshermen went forth 
from Jerusalem on their wonderful mission, for the 
spirit of Christianity to permeate the Roman world. 
But the Roman world awoke one morning, at the end 
of the three centuries, to find itself Christian. Three 
centuries after Columbus, thanks to him, the world 
awakes to find itself rei)ublican. 

It has been sought to detract from the fame of Co- 
lumbus by evidence that he was querulous, petulant, 
selfish, egotistical, unchaste, and even unjust. And it is 
greatly to be regretted that the learned historian of 
Cambridge has led in this movement. Fortunately, 
thus far he is a leader without followers. Columlms 
was human. So was George Washington. So was God- 
frey of Bouillon. So was Epaminondas. So were all 
the great and good men whose efforts have been di- 
rected to the exaltation of our common humanity. 
What might future generations think of George Wash- 



GHBISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 17 

ington if some literary ghoul of the Winsor school of 
history should resurrect the almost forgotten lampoons 
of Philip Frenau, and pass them off as credible contem- 
porary documents? Or, how might Abraham Lincoln 
stand in history if his true character were to be gleaned 
from some of the veracious daily chroniclers of the 
events of his own time ? The demigod of our fancies 
has never yet existed, except in our fancies. It is no 
reason that, because a man has weaknesses, he may not 
be a hero. Indeed, the most heroic soul is that which 
combines the resolute effort of superhuman will with 
the tender softness of woman; and hence it is, perhaps 
that acts of heroism are more frequent with women than 
with men, although probably less connected with con- 
tinuous purpose. Great deeds done have all been done 
by men like the rest of us. To the talet de chamhre — 
so the cynical French proverb says — no man is a hero. 
Let us leave to the valet de chamhre the details of the 
weaknesses that prove our heroes to be men. 

We are engaged as a nation — celebrating the four 
hundredth anniversary of the great enterprise. On 
the 17th of April, just four hundred years ago, Colum- 
bus received his commission from the hands of Queen 
Isabella. On the 12tli of next October, when four 
hundred years will have elapsed from that fateful 
morning on which the little sentinel island of San 
Salvador, standing at the portals of the New World, 
was revealed to the astonished gaze of Europe, the 
triumph of peace, the triumph of the world's art, the 
triumph of humanity, will be signalized in the Great 
City of our inland waters with the strains of mighty 
music and a hymn of praise from the pen of one of 
America's fairest and most gifted daughters, worthiest 
tribute a great nation and the great heart of humanity 



18 CHRISTOPHER COLTTMBUS. 

could pay to the hero who had made that nation possi- 
ble and lifted humanity out of the slough of feudal 
despond. Would it not be a fitting adjunct that our 
National Legislature should now and for all time de- 
cree the day to be a National holiday ? 

Columha, tlte dove, brooding over the primeval chaos 
of waters, is the symbol of the Creative Power in 
Genesis, when the earth emerged from the primordial 
formative process into a condition fit for human hab- 
itation. Golumha, the dove, was the harbinger of the 
subsidence of the waters and of the rediscovery of the 
land, when the Noachian Deluge had overwhelmed 
the corrupt civilization of an earlier world. Golumha, 
the dove, hovered over the waters of the Jordan Avhen 
Jesus of Nazareth prepared himself by baptism in its 
stream for his divine mission to renovate the world. 
It is a curious coincidence that the symbolic name 
should have been borne by the man destined by Provi- 
dence to manifest to Europe the New World of America, 
to provide for Freedom a home, for humanity its noblest 
destiny. 



